Godbeat

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What would happen if churches tried to reclaim All Hallows' Eve as their own?

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What would happen if churches tried to reclaim All Hallows' Eve as their own?

Greetings, GetReligion readers on this All Hallows' Eve.

If, by chance, you live in a small town or city somewhere in Middle America -- especially in a deep-red Bible Belt zip code -- there is a pretty good chance that your newspaper this morning contains a news-you-can-use item that starts something like this one. The headline: "Fall festivals and Halloween alternatives in the Oklahoma City area."

There's still time to visit fall festivals and Halloween alternative activities offered by area churches during the Halloween season. The following events, set for Saturday, are free, unless otherwise noted:
* Fall Festival, 6:30 to 8 p.m., Portland Avenue Baptist Church. ...
* Trunk or Treat, 6 to 8 p.m., Memorial Presbyterian Church. ...
* Trunk or Treat, 1 to 3 p.m., Trinity Baptist Church. ...
* Trunk or Treat, 6 to 8 p.m., Capitol Hill Assembly of God. ...
* FestiFall, 4 to 6 p.m., Putnam City Baptist Church. ... Big inflatables, candy, games in the building and a hayride will be offered. Parents must accompany children. Costumes welcome; scary costumes are discouraged. 

This list goes on and on, as do the many others like it. You can see the basic cultural DNA that is at work here, especially in the instructions with that Baptist FestiFall item. The key is that these churches are offering, basically, two different approaches to avoiding, or almost avoiding, the growing sort-of secular tsunami (about $6.9 billion in spending this year) called Halloween.

What's up with this? That was the topic of my Universal syndicate "On Religion" column this week, which "Crossroads" host Todd Wilken and I then discussed in this week's GetReligion podcast. Click here to tune that in.

You see, some religious believers are trying to avoid the unsafe or troubling elements of Halloween (thus, the growing "Trunk or Treat" phenomenon), while others are convinced that Halloween itself is, doctrinally speaking, fatally flawed.


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Washington Post leaves readers with a generic bishop, in Style story on 'Exorcism: Live!'

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I don't know about you, but the moment I heard about the "Exorcism: Live!" event on reality television, the very first thing I thought was this: There is no way on earth that a priest from a mainstream Catholic or Orthodox body agreed to take part in this pop-culture train wreck.

So, as I read through the Washington Post Style section take on this mass-media product, I was looking for one thing -- the name of the exorcist and the detailed identification of his church.

Surely, no one was going to write about this eve of Halloween production without giving readers that crucial detail? I mean, that would leave the religion-beat professionals at the Post pounding their heads on their desks. Right? Hold that thought. 

First, what is the fuss all about?

Welcome to “Exorcism: Live!” airing at 9 p.m. Friday on Destination America, a cable channel owned by Discovery Communications. The two-hour telecast tasks a clergyman, a psychic and the team from the network’s “Ghost Asylum” series to go into the spooky suburban St. Louis home that inspired “The Exorcist” book and movie. Ghost hunters insist that the house is filled with a dark, sinister energy, and “Exorcism: Live!” is determined to cleanse it.

Now, I happen to like the book that is behind all of this, and its author is a fascinating man (click here for my "On Religion" interview with him). And don't get me wrong. The documentation for the original case behind all of this is pretty disturbing stuff. The question is what it has to do with reality television, and the ministry of an exorcist.

So here is some more information on the supposedly troubled setting for today's planned epic.


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Former Episcopal bishop Heather Cook is off to prison, but who took the financial fall?

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It certainly appears, at this point, that the sad drama of former Maryland Episcopal bishop Heather Cook is over, at least the public part of this tragedy. She has been sentenced to seven years in prison for killing cyclist Thomas Palermo in a crash in which she was driving while drunk and distracted by the act of texting on her smartphone.

The Baltimore Sun report on the sentencing opens with gripping personal material about Cook and the Palermo family, and it's hard to fault the newspaper's staff for doing that.

But keep that smartphone in mind, because we will come back to it. You see, there was huge news in this story for the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland and the national Episcopal Church, but the Sun editors elected to bury it deep, deep, deep in the text.

I thought the following, near the top, was the most powerful passage, jumping right into the theodicy -- Where was God? -- angle of the story:

Prosecutors said Cook was far above the legal limit for alcohol and sending a text message as she drove her Subaru Forester in Roland Park on the afternoon of Dec. 27. She struck and killed Palermo, a 41-year-old software engineer and father of two young children, as he enjoyed a ride. She left the scene twice, a fact that weighed on judge Timothy J. Doory.

"Your leaving the scene at that time was more than irresponsibility, it was a decision," Doory said.

Cook, 59, pleaded guilty last month to automobile manslaughter, leaving the scene of an accident and other violations.

Patricia Palermo told the court that she had asked God many times why he let her son die -- until she had a revelation.

"God didn't do this," she said. "Heather Cook killed Tom."


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It's thumbsucker time, after the 'tea party' bishops crash the synod on the family

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The 2015 Synod of Bishops is over and this weekend was, as required by the traditions of journalism, dedicated to the writing of thumbsuckers.

What was the synod on the family all about? What did it mean? And most importantly, from the everything-is-politics viewpoint of most journalists, which political party won, the "reformers" who back Pope Francis and his appeals for mercy or the tea-party-like radical conservatives who want people to follow all those old church rules? 

Tea party? More on that later.

Any journalist who has ever written a summary, reaction think piece after a major event like this knows that one of the crucial questions is: Who gets the first quote? Journalists may interview dozens of people, with a variety of perspectives, but a reporter has make a choice and give someone the first quote. This choice almost always points to the thesis of the piece.

For example, consider the opening of the New York Times reaction story that was built on the reactions of New York Catholics.

People streaming into Catholic churches across New York over the weekend were struggling to understand the meaning of a statement issued by an assembly of bishops in the Vatican on the place within the church of Catholics who divorce and remarry.

And the first quote:

Ann Moore, 71, of Pittsburgh, attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan on Sunday. She expressed disgust with the bishops, who had been summoned by Pope Francis for a three-week global assembly on family issues, for not letting divorced and remarried Catholics receive communion.
“It’s wrong,” said Ms. Moore, who was in town to celebrate her daughter’s 50th birthday. “If Jesus forgave everybody, why can’t these big shots?”

This quote, for me, raised an interesting question that had been nagging me throughout the coverage of the synod.

Whatever one thinks of the Catholic Church's teachings on divorce, and how these doctrines are fleshed out at the level of pews and altars, I was struck by the fact that journalists -- at least the mainstream reporters I was reading -- were not quoting a rather authoritative source in their reports. To understand the high stakes of the battles in Rome, one really needed to hear from this particular voice of authority.

That source? That would be Jesus, as in the Gospel of Matthew:


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Generic, very modest Christians walk across America for some vague reason

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This is one of those posts where readers really need to be able to see the art that ran with a specific newspaper story, but that isn't possible because of copyright issues.

So let's start off by saying that you need to go take a look at The Denver Post story, the one with this headline: "Family ends hike across America at Union Station on Saturday."

OK, so you surfed over and looked that the photograph. What did you see?

With that in mind, here is the top of the story:

With 45-pound packs on their backs and a lifetime worth of tales, an Alabama family strode in front of Union Station on Saturday afternoon, marking the end of their walk across America.
Cheerfully sporting a broken collarbone, Jennifer Sunde said it was her idea to embark on the American Discovery Trail with her husband, Chris, and 18-year-old daughter, Katlyn.
The trail is more than 6,000 miles long and connects cities like Washington, D.C., and Colorado Springs with national and state forests, parks and historical sites. The motive of the trek was to spread love and encouragement to whomever they met along their journey while enjoying the sites.
"We are Christians," Sunde said. "We're told to love one another, so we wanted to show everyone that someone out there loves you no matter your religion, social status, class and so on."

Once again, think about the photo. Again, what did you see?

Describing the family, The Post team went with this:


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Sing it! Going to the 'chapel' (maybe) and we're gonna get married (on our terms)

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Sing it! Going to the 'chapel' (maybe) and we're gonna get married (on our terms)

There is an old saying in the religion-beat world that goes something like this: You can always find interesting news trends if you keep looking at what happens when each generation moves through the symbolic crossroads of life -- being born, getting married, having children and dying.

During this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I talked about a number of different trends linked to marriage in this day and age, spinning off from two New York Times stories. One was about people flocking to New York City for secular weddings in a state-run marriage bureau chapel. Yes, "chapel." The other was about the trend toward very sexy -- but still white -- wedding dresses.

All kinds of issues came up in this discussion. For example: Lots of churches have had to establish policies on how to handle couples who have been "living in sin" -- that's what people used to call it -- before marriage. There are still interesting stories to be found linked to that topic. But times move on. I am curious. In the age of R-rated wedding dresses, are religious leaders going to have to have wedding dress codes for brides? Do priests and rabbis need to approve wedding dresses in advance?

Truth be told, there is a big, big subject looming in the background during this chat. We are talking about radical American individualism and its whole "this day is all about you" wedding ethos that produces both gigantic, break-the-bank church weddings and all of those destination weddings on beaches, mountain cliffs and who knows where.

The bottom line is even bigger than the financial bottom line: Is the wedding a sacrament or not? Is the rite defined by individuals or by worshipping communities?


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On the journalistic usefulness of independent partisans in religion news

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On the journalistic usefulness of independent partisans in religion news

Godbeat 101: Reporters who cover the sprawling Southern Baptist Convention are well advised to monitor both the official Baptist Press and Baptist News Global, operated by folks who disagree with the SBC’s staunchly conservative administration. Likewise with the Presbyterian Church (USA); reporters should check out the headquarters Presbyterian News Service but also fare from the conservative www.layman.org.

The usefulness of such independent partisans is also evident with the Episcopal Church’s ongoing struggles. For example, the official Episcopal News Service has been slow to post an article about the 2014 local reports (.pdf found here) compiled in the annual “Table of Statistics." Has anything been published? Keep checking here.

Compare this reluctance with Baptist Press’s prompt recent report on unhappy annual statistics.

Reporters who carefully follow independent sources already knew about the Episcopal numbers because they’re reported -- indeed, trumpeted -- by juicyecumenism.com from the conservative Institute on Religion & Democracy, which keeps a close skeptical eye on the “mainline” Protestant denominations. I.R.D.’s  polemical headline: “Episcopalians Continue Bleeding Members, Attendance at Alarming Rate.” 

The nub: Episcopal attrition continues.  Compared with the prior year, membership dropped 2.7 percent, to 1,817,004. The decline in average Sunday worship attendance was worse, by 3.7 percent to 600,411. The South Carolina diocese’s walkout is a good chunk of this. Other numbers were also down. Consider that as recently as 2002 average attendance was 846,640 and membership was 2,320,221. Not to mention the 3,285,826 members back in 1970; in the years since, the U.S. population has more than doubled.  

Most “mainline” groups have likewise suffered steady losses since the 1960s but, writer Jeffrey Walton notes, the Episcopal slide mostly leveled off during the 1990s.


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Indian PM's mild reaction to violence over eating cows gets few bites in U.S. media

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Indian PM's mild reaction to violence over eating cows gets few bites in U.S. media

Scripture, as most GetReligion readers surely know, can be read in a myriad of contradictory ways. That includes interpretations that justify racism, slavery and  punishing or even eradicating those who believe or act differently.

Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and others are guilty of this. As are Hindus, despite their penchant for theological pluralism.

Now we have a politically influential Indian Hindu journal writing that the Vedas, Hinduism's oldest scriptural texts, say it is permissible to kill "sinners" who slaughter cows, which are revered in Hindu culture.

I doubt Mahatma Gandhi would have agreed with this. But then again, he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist who conceived the world through a darker  and narrower lens. 

If you're wondering about the news hook for this post is, it may be because other than The New York Times, American news media have paid little ongoing attention to this growing story (or so my relatively quick Web search found).

But look no further than the late-September killing of a Muslim Indian who was set upon by a Hindu mob acting on rumors that he had slaughtered a cow for food, an allegation that has not held up, according to later reports. He was one of three people to die in the last month in violent incidents related to consuming beef.

Here's a Times story summing up the basic situation. And here's a BBC report that explains India's laws concerning the slaughtering and eating of cows.

Note the Times story's critical political angle.


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Mormon leader calls for balance, and Associated Press calls it 'transformation'

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Mainstream media apparently are still hyperventilating over Pope Francis' "Who am I to judge?" remark, plugging it into other news stories. This week's version is a speech by Mormon Elder Dallin H. Oaks, who called yesterday for religious and secular people to respect each others' rights and beliefs.

"Compromise" and "balance" were the keywords in Oaks' speech at the Second Annual Sacramento Court/Clergy Conference in California. Oaks, a member of the first-echelon the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, urged his listeners to tune out extremist voices on either side.

He preached a view not of an opaque wall between church and state, but a "curtain" that allows "the passage of light and love and mutual support." But he also said that county clerks -- all but saying Kim Davis' name -- need to put aside their own beliefs and perform their sworn duties.

Nice olive branch, don't ya think? But the Associated Press version makes it sound like a p.r. strategy, inserting commentary into what was supposed to be a news report:

The speech marked another landmark moment in the conservative religion's transformation from a faith that frowned on gays and lesbians to one becoming more welcoming and compassionate, albeit in small steps that may seem nominal to outsiders.
As with the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Francis, the conservative Mormons are trying to assert a softer position in society, while holding firm inside the church to its own doctrines against gay marriage and homosexual activity.

This story is almost like a candy store for media critics like myself. First, we have the LDS Church called "conservative" -- the word is used three times in this story -- without explaining what that means. Social? Cultural? Political? Theological?

The article also calls the talk a big sign of "transformation," as if the church is about to change its basic beliefs. It's odd that AP invokes Francis, who is likewise prodding the Catholic Church toward a gentler attitude without anything like a transformation.  


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